Feeling a bit more responsive today.

What has your experience learning to code been like so far? What would you change about it?

Austin Coding Academy’s flipped classroom model, and the pretty rapid pace of the full-time program has been pretty great so far. Before enrolling, I was just doing paid courses on Udemy. There was some awesome and useful content on there for sure, but it was difficult to find day to day motivation without actual assignments and classmates to team up with. Also having a live instructor as cool as Keith is far more interesting than watching hours of pre-recorded and possibly outdated lecture. Just one week into the program, so far so good!

How do you describe the DOM, as you know it so far?

The DOM (Document Object Model) is basically the way a browser renders an HTML document. It’s broken down into a tree-like structure, reading top-down, with each object of the document being a branch (or node) with nested branches, and so on… rendering each object in the order it is received, creating a parent/child relationship between objects in the same branch.

Can you explain the difference between coding a website to be responsive and using a mobile-first strategy?

When building a website to be responsive, you start by building the project to render properly on larger desktop devices, and then by using media queries you can set max width settings and have different styling properties for smaller screens. For instance, if we had a grid layout of 3 columns and 5 rows on a desktop monitor, we could set it to be a more vertical layout of maybe only 1–2 columns and 8 rows for mobile devices. When building mobile-first, it would just be the opposite as in you build your page initially for smaller screens, and then use min width media queries to expand your layout as the display becomes larger.

What does coding look like to you in your mind?

Quite the contrary to IKEA furniture manuals, code looks like a colorful, beautifully laid out, and coherent line-by-line set of instructions to perform the only the highest level of magic known to man.

Where do you see yourself working in 365 days from today? What do you want to be working on?

I’d love to be working for any big tech company with all of the wonderful amenities and top salaries of course. But, working for a start-up and helping to be part of something innovative from the ground up would be even more a pleasure. Perhaps I’ll even have an idea for my own in 365 days… 🤔